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Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure Lead IaaS Market

While AWS is used by the majority of enterprise IaaS customers, Microsoft Azure is the next most likely IaaS vendor to be evaluated, according to a survey by 451 Research.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) remains the leader in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) adoption among enterprise IT buyers, according to a 451 Research survey of more than 1,500 global IT professionals, including 1,000 unique vendor evaluations.

AWS is used by the majority of enterprise IaaS customers in the study (57 percent) and is also cited as the most important IaaS provider by 35 percent of these current IaaS customers.

Microsoft Azure has been adopted by 42 percent of enterprises surveyed and is listed most often as the vendor that enterprises will likely evaluate for their next IaaS supplier.

Overall, Microsoft Azure is cited as the most important IaaS provider by 20 percent of IaaS customers.

Further reading

"For IaaS, AWS is the clear market leader in terms of adoption by enterprises as an IaaS provider," Scott Ottoway, a vice president at 451 Research, told eWEEK. "However, it is a very large market in terms of total revenue, and there are other hyperscale providers, such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Rackspace, that provide highly competitive offers based on initial cost, total cost and breadth of platform/technologies offered."

The survey results demonstrated that current AWS customers believe that AWS is fulfilling key criteria such as "technical innovation" and "value for money," and across 16 attributes and criteria, AWS offers high promise and high fulfillment relative to all other vendors.

While AWS is dominant right now, Microsoft Azure has been adopted by 42 percent of enterprises and it is the next most likely IaaS vendor to be evaluated by enterprises, according to the survey.

"We were surprised by this adoption rate of both Azure and Rackspace as it indicates more competition in the market based on our previous surveys and internal models," Ottoway said.

Hosted private cloud is now adopted by 34 percent of organizations, but the report noted it is a highly fragmented market—cloud providers with less than 3 percent market share account for 52 percent of all currently used vendors, while Rackspace is the No. 1 vendor in this market with 20 percent market share.

"I see cloud service providers focused on providing the broadest set of platform technologies that meet the diverse IT and business requirements of enterprises and also offering managed services for mission-critical line of business applications, either directly, such as Rackspace and CenturyLink, as well as through partners like Microsoft, Google or AWS," Ottoway said.

He noted additionally that 451 Research has seen a lot of interest in offering hosted private cloud and bare-metal servers to provide single tenancy and avoid noisy-neighbor problem.

"The broader platform allows cloud service providers to sell into enterprise organizations with more than just IaaS-focused offers," he said.